Tracking Oppression

“To be robust is to attempt something beyond the perimeter of our own constituted identity; to get beyond our thoughts or the edge of our own selfishness. Robustness and vulnerability belong together. To be robust is to show a willingness to take collateral damage, to put up temporary pain, noise, chaos or our systems being temporarily undone.” – David Whyte, from his book Consolations.

Where are your delicate and vulnerable spots that, when touched, cause a defensive reaction? The reactions can be provoked in our work life and home life, watching the news, and even on our commutes. Often, as humans, when we get scared or insecure in any way, we react sometimes with an out-sized response. Such reactions can be on autopilot until we gain self-awareness and a desire to show up differently. 

The key to navigating life’s more triggering moments with consciousness and grace comes in wondering: What place in me got hit? What added to my sense of insecurity? What am I afraid of here? How else could I orient myself to this feeling or situation? 

In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, author and somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem explains the dominating and reactive feeling that fear can bring up in us. One bite-sized example he shares is: What do you do when you see a spider that scares you? For most of us, a reaction can be quick and sharp: we get scared and kill the spider. Our reaction to our fear is to crush the threat. We move to save the scared part of ourselves in one fell swoop of domination. 

In our human relational spaces, it’s much less cool to reach for the more extreme forms of physical annihilation (but as a coach, I can say that stories of co-founder conflict breaking out into fistfights are not a myth). I’d wager, though, that for most of us, in passing and in the day-to-day, our reactions come out in less direct ways like passive-aggressive swoops, or other defensive tactics that are equally as domineering in the space they take up: like getting loud in a meeting or telling folks why they are wrong. 

Truth is: when we’re scared or threatened in any way, our listening range narrows, our vision narrows, and we begin to mobilize the neurological pathways of our most reactionary emotional greatest hits. This is usually not the best version of ourselves showing up, but without awareness and a conscious effort to do it differently, we’ll use this playlist on repeat.

For a lot of us, shame can be a big trigger point (and how we feel about ourselves affects our leadership). When things happen in our environment such as when we receive feedback that’s hard to hear or a co-worker makes a comment during a meeting about efforts we were involved in that rubs us the wrong way, or anything taken in through our narrowed filter feels like a slight or attack against our places of insecurity, we might be spiraling down the emotional slide deep into our own pile of shame. Once we land there, everything hurts. (Core shame and physical pain activate the same regions in the brain.) 

And, once we land there, of course, we want nothing more than to get out of that painful, shameful place. With reactions of anger or retaliation, or in a swoop of grandiosity, we stoop to metaphorically knock out that scary, threatening spider. Only, in our lives we may knock out other humans in the process–shutting them down, not listening, poor communication…whatever your greatest hits list of defenses are. When we feel powerless, sometimes we can exercise power over anything to feel better about ourselves. Once we become aware of what and where those things are for us in our lives, that is tracking oppression at its place of origin. 

As my colleague, author, and fellow horse-wise-woman, Kelly Wendorf notes: “None of us are immune to the impacts of living in a colonized world. The shame that seeps into our bloodstream every day through media, family patterns, and institutionalized functioning, renders us victims and plays into the power-over order. Power-over not only perpetuates fear, isolation, and subversion but creates a fragility of the psyche that is highly defensive, rigid, frightened, and closed to new ideas.”

As always, the move towards systemic change is an inside job. By locating and learning about our fragility, and then as an antidote, locating and exercising our robustness, we can unveil our truest, authentic, most undomesticated, decolonized self.

Fragility operates from a power-over mindset. Kelly underscores that “Power-over mindsets can only see two options: to be the prey or to be the predator. It is a rigid win-lose, right-wrong, good-bad binary that uses power to subvert and oppress in order that they not be subverted or oppressed themselves. If this mindset perceives itself as not winning, then it is losing. If it is not seen as good, then it is bad. If it is not preying on, it is the prey.” 

Where does fragility show up in your life or work? What is it that gets you threatened in you? What happens to the ‘threat’ in the process? What are your go-to defenses? 

Robustness, in comparison, operates radically differently. 

Wendorf tells us: “Robustness recognizes we are each a part of a living breathing whole – we always belong, we are never ever alone and therefore we are ultimately profoundly safe. Robustness resolutely stands strong in the face of fragility’s supreme demand for comfort. It sees self and other as robust and therefore not in need of pandering, caretaking, pleasing, rescuing, or fixing. Robustness is open to feedback, accountable to impact, and curious about different world views. Robustness is willing to be broken open and normalizes discomfort.”

Moving into robustness is a transformative move from the defensive stance of fragility that acts out of self-preservation. Or as another favorite wise horsewoman, Anna Blake, writes:

“If you want to dominate something, control your own self.” 

For when we learn to lean into the wholeness of who we are, we can meet life — in all of its heartbreak and all of its beauty and mystery — from a place of security in our sense of self and strength in our capacity to face it all with our honest, vulnerable, most humane self. 

We find more ease with uncertainty. We manage our fear responses and learn to shift back into openness. While conflict and hard conversations may never be easy, we find more capacity for them and skill in navigating them. We listen and ask open honest questions. We commit ourselves to showing up authentically. 

“It’s as if we start to fill our own shoes,” Kelly notes, as we confidently claim our right to be fully here, embodied in our unique expression.

Where in your life have you felt robustness? What does it feel like in your body? How do you show up differently? What are you believing about yourself and the world when you show up that way? Where are the places in which showing up this way happens with ease? Where are the places and spaces where showing up in robustness is more challenging?